


Imagine Your Name Is Emma Barnes

by Mechanical



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-11
Updated: 2019-05-11
Packaged: 2020-03-01 05:18:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18793777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mechanical/pseuds/Mechanical
Summary: Emma Barnes: the bully, the traitor, who turned on her best friend, inadvertently putting her on the path to becoming the world's saviour. Who was she, really? Oneshot.





	Imagine Your Name Is Emma Barnes

Imagine your name is Emma Barnes.

You’re a shining girl – a pretty glass vessel, full of life. You’re growing into beauty, though as a young teen you’re not there yet, of course. It’s enough you have a job as a model. You have too many friends to count, and one of them close enough she’s family, blood relations or no – a cheerful chatterbox, all twiggy limbs and curly dark hair. The baby of the family, your parents spoil you immensely. What you want, you get. Bad things might happen in the world, but not Brockton Bay.

You’re a fragile girl. You can’t sleep with the lights off if you watch a horror movie, even with Taylor there to tie a blanket round her neck and pretend to be a hero. When people talk of villains, you can’t push down the nervous feeling deep in your stomach. It’s fair to be afraid. You live in a world of monsters, though you’re not old enough to really understand what that means. The names of cities lost are just places you’ve never been to (and never will). The adults tend to stop talking about things like _leviathan_ and _slaughterhouse nine_ when you enter the room.

That delicate vessel of your heart is padded with the assurances of adults that they’ll protect you – that heroes win battles and save the innocent, that bad things might happen in Brockton Bay but not _here_.

 

Taylor suffers tragedy, and for a while, she’s broken. You look at her heart and how the parts don’t fit together any more, and try to piece it back together without cutting yourself on the edges. At least it wasn't you, you think guiltily. You know its not her fault she doesn't laugh as much, her smiles are slower and smaller, but it still sometimes feels like a drag. You wonder if she’s permanently damaged, that she’ll never be whole again, but slowly, surely, she starts to mend. Bad things might happen in Brockton Bay, but at least they didn't happen to you.

 

One day they do; the monsters catch you. They call themselves the ABB. They drag you out the car, cut your hair, try to make you choose what to lose. At last you thrash and fight, and a shadow saves you, but your world has already been crushed beneath their feet.

You sequester yourself in your room, not talking to others, not seeing their faces. If you ignore the world, perhaps it will leave you alone. The thought rings hollow. You hate how your family handles you with such a gentle touch - every careful word a caress on an open wound, a reminder of how you were powerless. After a week, you feel forced out the house by cloying kindness, waiting for the rest to leave before you slip out. Your feet carry you to the monster’s lair again. There’s no signs of it, now, but you meet the shadow again. She’s a girl, named Sophia or sometimes Shadow Stalker, and she tells you you’re a survivor.

_It’s all about strength,_ Sophia tells you. _That’s the way the world works._

 

You become a bully. You pull out the glass shards of your heart and use them to carve Taylor’s asunder, hoping what she bleeds will congeal and fill the cracks in you. For a time… it works. You’re the god-queen of this little coop, handing out divine punishment without fear. Strength is only strength when you use it. Taylor just takes it, slowly grinding down into grey misery. You learn to take joy in the betrayal in her eyes when she doesn’t fight back, as you push her further and further without finding a limit, pushing down any guilt so far you'll never feel it at all.

_She’s a victim_ , Sophia says. _That we can do it is proof enough that we deserve to be able to._

 

The locker. You don’t know it, but the world changes.

 

There’s a change in your victim. She hits you, and the plastered-over cracks in your soul begin to fracture again, but it's not enough to shatter you. Even a cornered rat can bite, you tell yourself. It doesn't mean it'll survive the coming of the cat.

 

A monster attacks Brockton Bay. You and yours are safe, but when you return the city is ugly and different. Taylor is different, her battered soul reforged into something sharp and jagged and strong. This time, when you corner her in what had been the corridors of your highschool petty kingdom, you lose. You jab and barb, and she doesn’t care, even when you shove at her, reducing yourself from superior to assaulter to just try and prove that’s she’s lesser.

A villain in the school and the villain is Taylor; your ex-victim is Skitter, warrior, warlord, one feared and respected and significant. All this time, all that suffering – she’d let you do it. It had not been the strong stepping on the weak. The strong had permitted the weak to do so. The heroes array themselves against her and fail; the students come to her call, doing for her what they’d never in a hundred years do for you. She held you in her power and didn't even spare you a thought.

All your efforts to become strong – they were for… what? It was all pointless. You never did matter like you thought you did.

You almost don’t feel your world give way again.

 

The world ends – not just for you, this time, but everyone. The golden man is a murderer. For you, broken glass girl, it’s a final statement.

There’s no strength that can resist this. In a world of gods and monsters, an ordinary girl will always be nothing. Sophia is gone, for all her strength. Madison and the rest of your little clique, gone. You pile your furniture against the door as best you can and hide under the covers.

Your parents hammer at your door, desperate. It’s no use; the barricade you erected might not keep out the world, but it can keep out them.

_Please, Emma, open the door_ , they say, over and over. _We have to go. Please._

You don’t reply, as mother tries and father tries and sister tries, until eventually the voices fade. Your father’s expensive car purrs into life and leaves, and you are alone.

A distant boom shakes the house around you, rattling the glass in the windowframe. You stand up and look out. A golden light is flowing over the land, and everything it touches turns to ash. Even if you could run, you wouldn’t. There wouldn’t be a point to it. As the light comes, you close your eyes.

In the end, you were so very small.

 

Maybe you’re worthy of hate, traitorous girl, the Judas who carved her soul-sister into the saviour of the world with betrayed promises and acid words.

Maybe you’re worthy of pity, broken girl. _It’s a nasty, brutish little planet_ , Sophia had told you, and she wasn't wrong. You just never were strong enough to bear the weight of it.

I can’t tell you what you should feel for her; you’ll have to decide that for yourself.

Just imagine your name is Emma Barnes.


End file.
